October 5, 2010

Terrorism, Vigilance and the Limits of the War on Terror

October 5, 2010 | 0903 GMT

By George Friedman

The U.S. government issued a warning Oct. 3 advising Americans
traveling to Europe to be “vigilant.” U.S. intelligence apparently has
acquired information indicating that al Qaeda is planning to carry out
attacks in European cities similar to those carried out in Mumbai, India, in November 2008.
In Mumbai, attackers armed with firearms, grenades and small, timed
explosive devices targeted hotels frequented by Western tourists and
other buildings in an attack that took three days to put down.

European security forces are far better trained and prepared than
their Indian counterparts, and such an attack would be unlikely to last
for hours, much less days, in a European country. Still, armed assaults
conducted by suicide operatives could be expected to cause many
casualties and certainly create a dramatic disruption to economic and
social life.

The first question to ask about the Oct. 3 warning, which lacked
specific and actionable intelligence, is how someone can be vigilant
against such an attack. There are some specific steps that people can
and should take to practice good situational awareness as well as some common-sense travel-security precautions. But if you find yourself sleeping in a hotel room
as gunmen attack the building, rush to your floor and start entering
rooms, a government warning simply to be vigilant would have very little
meaning.

The world is awash in intelligence about terrorism. Most of it is
meaningless speculation, a conversation intercepted between two Arabs
about how they’d love to blow up London Bridge. The problem, of course,
is how to distinguish between idle chatter and actual attack planning.
There is no science involved in this, but there are obvious guidelines.
Are the people known to be associated with radical Islamists? Do they
have the intent and capability to conduct such an attack? Were any
specific details mentioned in the conversation that can be vetted? Is
there other intelligence to support the plot discussed in the
conversation?

The problem is that what appears quite obvious in the telling is much
more ambiguous in reality. At any given point, the government could
reasonably raise the alert level if it wished. That it doesn’t raise it
more frequently is tied to three things. First, the intelligence is
frequently too ambiguous to act on. Second, raising the alert level
warns people without really giving them any sense of what to do about
it. Third, it can compromise the sources of its intelligence.

The current warning is a perfect example of the problem. We do not
know what intelligence the U.S. government received that prompted the
warning, and I suspect that the public descriptions of the intelligence
do not reveal everything that the government knows. We do know that a
German citizen was arrested in Afghanistan in July and has allegedly
provided information regarding this threat, but there are likely other
sources contributing to the warning, since the U.S. government
considered the intelligence sufficient to cause concern. The Obama
administration leaked on Saturday that it might issue the warning, and
indeed it did.
The government did not recommend that Americans not travel to Europe.
That would have affected the economy and infuriated Europeans. Leaving
tourism aside, since tourism season is largely over, a lot of business
is transacted by Americans in Europe. The government simply suggested
vigilance. Short of barring travel, there was nothing effective the
government could do. So it shifted the burden to travelers. If no attack
occurs, nothing is lost. If an attack occurs, the government can point
to the warning and the advice. Those hurt or killed would not have been
vigilant.

I do not mean to belittle the U.S. government on this. Having picked
up the intelligence it can warn the public or not. The public has a
right to know, and the government is bound by law and executive order to
provide threat information. But the reason that its advice is so vague
is that there is no better advice to give. The government is not so much
washing its hands of the situation as acknowledging that there is not
much that anyone can do aside from the security measures travelers
should already be practicing.

The alert serves another purpose beyond alerting the public. It
communicates to the attackers that their attack has been detected if not
penetrated, and that the risks of the attack have pyramided. Since
these are most likely suicide attackers not expecting to live through
the attack, the danger is not in death. It is that the Americans or the
Europeans might have sufficient intelligence available to thwart the
attack. From the terrorist point of view,
losing attackers to death or capture while failing to inflict damage is
the worst of all possible scenarios. Trained operatives are scarce, and
like any strategic weapon they must be husbanded and, when used, cause
maximum damage. When the attackers do not know what Western intelligence
knows, their risk of failure is increased along with the incentive to
cancel the attack. A government warning, therefore, can prevent an
attack.

In addition, a public warning can set off a hunt for the leak within
al Qaeda. Communications might be shut down while the weakness is
examined. Members of the organization might be brought under suspicion.
The warning can generate intense uncertainty within al Qaeda as to how
much Western intelligence knows. The warning, if it correlates with an
active plot, indicates a breach of security, and a breach of security
can lead to a witch-hunt that can paralyze an organization.

Therefore, the warning might well have served a purpose, but the
purpose was not necessarily to empower citizens to protect themselves
from terrorists. Indeed, there might have been two purposes. One might
have been to disrupt the attack and the attackers. The other might have
been to cover the government if an attack came.

In either case, it has to be recognized that this sort of warning
breeds cynicism among the public. If the warning is intended to empower
citizens, it engenders a sense of helplessness, and if no attack occurs,
it can also lead to alert fatigue. What the government is saying to its
citizenry is that, in the end, it cannot guarantee that there won’t be
an attack and therefore its citizens are on their own. The problem with
that statement is not that the government isn’t doing its job but that
the job cannot be done. The government can reduce the threat of terrorism. It cannot eliminate it.

This brings us to the strategic point. The defeat of jihadist terror
cells cannot be accomplished defensively. Homeland security can mitigate
the threat, but it can never eliminate it. The only way to eliminate it
is to destroy all jihadist cells and prevent the formation of new cells
by other movements or by individuals forming new movements, and this
requires not just destroying existing organizations but also the radical
ideology that underlies them. To achieve this, the United States and
its allies would have to completely penetrate a population of about 1.3
billion people and detect every meeting of four or five people planning
to create a terrorist cell. And this impossible task would not even
address the problem of lone-wolf terrorists. It is simply impossible to
completely dominate and police the entire world, and any effort to do so
would undoubtedly induce even more people to turn to terrorism in
opposition to the global police state.

Will Rogers was asked what he might do to deal with the German U-boat
threat in World War I. He said he would boil away the Atlantic,
revealing the location of the U-boats that could then be destroyed.
Asked how he would do this, he answered that that was a technical
question and he was a policymaker.

The idea of suppressing jihadist terrorism through direct military
action in the Islamic world would be an idea Will Rogers would have
appreciated. It is a superb plan from a policymaking perspective. It
suffers only from the problem of technical implementation. Even native
Muslim governments motivated to suppress Islamic terrorism, like those
in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria or Yemen,
can’t achieve this goal absolutely. The idea that American troops,
outnumbered and not speaking the language or understanding the culture,
can do this is simply not grounded in reality.

The United States and Europe are going to be attacked by jihadist
terrorists from time to time, and innocent people are going to be
killed, perhaps in the thousands again. The United States and its allies
can minimize the threat through covert actions and strong defenses, but
they cannot eliminate it. The hapless warning to be vigilant that was
issued this past weekend is the implicit admission of this fact.

This is not a failure of will or governance. The United States can’t
conceivably mount the force needed to occupy the Islamic world, let
alone pacify it to the point where it can’t be a base for terrorists.
Given that the United States can’t do this in Afghanistan, the idea that it might spread this war throughout the Islamic world is unsupportable.

The United States and Europe are therefore dealing with a threat that
cannot be stopped by their actions. The only conceivably effective
actions would be those taken by Muslim governments, and even those are
unlikely to be effective. There is a deeply embedded element within a
small segment of the Islamic world that is prepared to conduct terror
attacks, and this element will occasionally be successful.

All people hate to feel helpless, and this trait is particularly
strong among Americans. There is a belief that America can do anything
and that something can and should be done to eliminate terrorism and not
just mitigate it. Some Americans believe sufficiently ruthless military
action can do it. Others believe that reaching out in friendship might
do it. In the end, the terrorist element will not be moved by either
approach, and no amount of vigilance (or new bureaucracies) will stop
them.

It would follow then that the West will have to live with the
terrorist threat for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that
military, intelligence, diplomatic, law-enforcement or financial action
should be stopped. Causing most terrorist attempts to end in failure is
an obviously desirable end. It not only blocks the particular action but
also discourages others. But the West will have to accept that there
are no measures that will eliminate the threat entirely. The danger will
persist.

Effort must be made to suppress it, but the level of effort has to be
proportional not to the moral insult of the terrorist act but to
considerations of other interests beyond counterterrorism. The United
States has an interest in suppressing terrorism. Beyond a certain level
of effort, it will reach a point of diminishing returns. Worse, by
becoming narrowly focused on counterterrorism and over-committing
resources to it, the United States will leave other situations
unattended as it focuses excessively on a situation it cannot improve.

The request that Americans be vigilant in Europe represents the
limits of power on the question of terrorism. There is nothing else that
can be done and what can be done is being done. It also drives home the
fact that the United States and the West in general cannot focus all of
its power on solving a problem that is beyond its power to solve.
The long war against terrorism will not be the only war fought in the
coming years. The threat of jihadism must be put in perspective and the
effort aligned with what is effective. The world is a dangerous place,
as they say, and jihadism is only one of the dangers.